{"id":418824,"date":"2026-04-26T18:39:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T18:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/418824\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T18:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T18:39:09","slug":"piers-morgans-russell-brand-interview-perfectly-straddled-old-and-new-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/418824\/","title":{"rendered":"Piers Morgan\u2019s Russell Brand interview perfectly straddled old and new media"},"content":{"rendered":"

In one of the most celebrated episodes of The Simpsons, Bart\u2019s nemesis Sideshow Bob steps on nine rakes in a row. The idea of the two-minute scene<\/a> was to linger on the joke long enough that it turns around to being funny again. It takes guts to commit to such a strategy, but the payoff can be enormous.<\/p>\n

In a similar episode that went viral this weekend, for two brilliantly excruciating minutes in his interview<\/a> with Piers Morgan, Russell Brand noisily flips through his Bible in search of a meaningful verse, umming and ahhing all the while. The awkwardness, the social pressure, would have gotten to most of us. But Morgan, despite his reputation<\/a> for not allowing guests to get a word in edgewise, is a professional and knows exactly when to hold his tongue.<\/p>\n

At one point in the interview, Brand claims that the old media is falling apart; the pendulum is swinging, he says, towards such cranks as David Icke and Alex Jones. Morgan is one of the few figures who\u2019s managed to straddle both worlds, pivoting seamlessly from ITV and the Daily Mirror to the more anarchic online scene. He is a product of Fleet Street \u2014 he still speaks fondly, in the interview, about Rupert Murdoch. And yet he is in his element with the new shock jocks and rabblerousers, grilling Candace Owens<\/a> and, infamously, Nick Fuentes<\/a>, while most other media wouldn\u2019t host them on a show.<\/p>\n

In 2006, when he first interviewed<\/a> Brand, Morgan was at the summit of the old media in all its laddish pomp. Much of that interview consists of Morgan needling Brand for information about his liaisons with Kate Moss. \u201cHow many?\u201d he asks, over and over again. \u201cHow many a week at your peak?\u201d<\/p>\n

It is impressive that Morgan has managed to dominate the media landscape for as long as he has. His public persona has remained more or less the same. He is coarse, direct, and annoying, and he likes it that way. It is a point of pride for him that he winds people up. The tagline of Piers Morgan Uncensored is \u201cinform, irritate, and entertain\u201d; irritation is an indispensable part of the formula.<\/p>\n

Part of Morgan\u2019s shtick is that he doesn\u2019t care what people think of him. Of course, that isn\u2019t really true. He cares very deeply about being thought of as his own man. The one thing that seems to rankle him, in his interview with Brand, is the latter\u2019s accusation of hypocrisy: Morgan, like the rest of the \u201cmainstream media\u201d, purports to be \u201cneutral\u201d and is anything but. \u201cI\u2019m not neutral!\u201d Morgan protests. \u201cI have a lot of opinions, and I\u2019m not afraid to share them!\u201d He continues, with characteristic hyperbole: \u201cI\u2019m probably the least neutral person on the airwaves in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clearly, it matters to Morgan that he is perceived as opinionated and independent-minded. It matters to him that his politics are hard to pin down. The conceit of Morgan & Platell<\/a>, a mid-2000s talk show, was that he was \u201con the Left\u201d and Amanda Platell \u201con the Right\u201d, even if it was admitted that Morgan was probably to the Right of Platell in reality. Now he thinks of himself as a kind of ascended centrist, attacking both sides in equal measure. His preferred mode, acquired in the no-holds-barred world of the British tabloids, is to be punchy, aggressive, adversarial towards anything that comes his way. Morgan has managed to be a good conduit between the old media and the new because it has given him the role he craves \u2014 a disagreeable outsider to each.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In one of the most celebrated episodes of The Simpsons, Bart\u2019s nemesis Sideshow Bob steps on nine rakes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[93,61,60,114829,183444,25071,109394,282],"class_list":{"0":"post-418824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-legacy-media","12":"tag-new-media","13":"tag-piers-morgan","14":"tag-russell-brand","15":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}